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Bestialität (Beastliness)
The piano player, that's how the other detainees called her. She had come to camp on a ringing frost, in winter '44. She was twenty and had won five awards at international contests. Her mother used to tear stripes of the ragged clothes to wrap up and keep her fingers warm. One evening toward spring, during the Appell, ''when the ''SS-man passed by her, she gave a start. The SS-man noticed it. He stopped walking and dropped his cigarette. "Pick it up!" he ordered. When the girl kneeled down, and reached the cigarette the SS-man stepped on her hand. The girl started to scream and her desperate mother dashed to the SS-''man, who knocked her down with one blow. The woman kneeled down and seizing the executioner's boot tried to save her daughter's hand. The ''SS-man pulled out the pistol, put it tot he mother's nape of the neck and pulled the trigger slowly, without any haste, while he crushed under his heel the girl's fingers... One day in Birkenau, ''a ''Häftling in the camp E'' has seen, through the barbed wire fence his only brother who was still alive. (The rest of the family had perished long before. In the ghetto, during deportation or in other concentration camps). He rushed to the fence, calling his brother by name. On hearing him brother did the same and they simultaneously arrived et the barbed wire fence, unable to utter a word, unable even to breath with excitement. And the next moment it would have been too late to say something. The ''SS sentinels in the watchtowers at each extremity of the fence pilled the trigger of their machine-rifles. The bodies of the tow brothers fell over the barbed wires conducting high-tension current. When their fingers touched they no longer could feel any warmth. Their bodies had already been carbonized... At Mauthausen, '''''in winter 1944 / 1945 a young Häftling'' sick with dysentery was minutes late to ''Appell.'' Such violation of discipline was enough to trigger of ''die Bestialität,'' the beastliness of any ''SS''-man. So, when the ''Häftling'' got back to the quarry where his detachment was working, the ''Kommandoführer'' ordered him to follow him to the rivulet near by that had been bridged over by a thick layer of ice for more than a month. ''"Schnell,'' go to the middle of the river and break the ''ice!"'' the ''SS''-mean ordered. The young ''Häftling'' worked to break the ice and make a hole half a meter in diameter. "Into the water!" the'' Kommandoführer'' yelled and hit the ''Häftling'' with a cudgel he always carried along, in orders to reinforce his order. The young man obeyed but as the water was nit very deep, the upper part of his body remained out. This enraged theKommandoführer' who started hitting him over the head to make him squat and disappear under the ice. From time to time the unfortunate young man bobbed up again to breath and the 'SS'-man let him pant for breath for a few seconds, then with a snow of blows he again made him immerse under the water. The scene was repeated several times and then the 'SS'-man ordered him to get out from water and stand at attention. Because of the biting frost detainee's clothes soon turned into a cover of ice. Even the water dripping on his face turned into icicles. A quarter of an hour later, the 'Kommandoführer,' anxious to reach a warm place confronted the detainee with the choice: either to work till evening in his clothes of ice, or to make for the watchtower to be shot. After a brief moment of hesitation, which lasted no more than a start, the 'Häftling' headed for the watchtower. After the liberation, on of the tens of thousands of 'SS' executioners, Gustav Sorge, nicknamed Iron Gustav, who for eight years had served in various concentration camps gradually climbed the hierarchic ladder (from block chief he became a camp chief) was told during trial by the prosecutor: "During the preliminary inquiry you declared that all 'SS'-men in the camp were, to a smaller or greater extent 'Bestien,beasts. ''Sorge:'' "Yes, it is true, ''das waren alle Bestien,'' they were all beasts." ''Prosecutor:'' "What did ''ihre Bestialität,'' their beastliness show in? ''Sorge:'' " It showed in the torturing of the detainees, in hitting them with sharp objects, in the punishments they applied to them such as hurrying the detainees alive or hounding dogs at them, etc. Sorge stopped short his listing. He could have gone on for hours and days on end not finish, to mention all aspects of the beastliness of the ''SS'''''-men; everything they thought, they said or did was beastly.